Frustration Plantation
by Gamma Orionis
Summary: "See as their wills are broke and bending, see the good girls in their glory". (A series of one-shots about the women of the Black family, written for Fire the Canon's Album Challenge on the HPFC Forum.) Pt 3: Lysandra
1. Doomsday Averted - Cedrella

Author's Notes: Written for Fire the Canon's Album Challenge on the HPFC Forum, in which each track from an album is used for inspiration for a one-shot in a collection.

I am using the album _Frustration Plantation_ by Rasputina.

* * *

_Doomsday averted._

)O(

Throughout Cedrella's childhood, marriage was a far-off thing, so far away that it might never even happen, and then, all of a sudden, she was standing in her bedroom with her arms outstretched and her sisters were helping the dressmaker fit her with lengths of pearl-coloured silk for her wedding dress.

"Are you listening to me, Cedrella?" Lysandra asked sharply.

"Yes, Mother."

"What did I just say?"

"I don't know."

"I was saying that Mr. Rosier will expect his bride to act like a lady, and not go running about like a girl of six. Tomboyishness is not attractive, Cedrella."

"Cedrella isn't a tomboy, Mother," Charis said dutifully, from her position at Cedrella's feet, where she was basting up the of the dress with carefully controlled but utterly effortless little movements of her wand.

"Not to you, perhaps, but to a man of Mr. Rosier's age and stature..."

_Mr. Rosier's age and stature_.

Old.

Wealthy.

Too old, and not wealthy enough to make up for it. Tears pricked Cedrella's eyes with the same pain as the pins pricking her waist and legs when the dressmaker was careless. She knew not to complain – she had tried to, once, to Callidora, and received a swift smack around the face and a reminder that Callidora's own husband was sixteen years her senior.

But Callidora was suited to an older husband. Callidora was soft and quiet and plump, with the disposition of an amiable cow. She could sit contentedly in a parlour and read or listen to music or sew for hours on end, and engage in the sort of quiet, intellectual, unexcitable discourse that her husband so enjoyed. She had been content to retire at the age of seventeen to life of semi-reclusive comfort and monotony that would not end until her husband died.

Cedrella was not so content. She could not fathom the prospect of waking up every morning and being faced with days upon days of endless _nothing_. Quiet conversation did not excite her, and a life without excitement would be no life at all for her.

Mr. Rosier was a good man, she knew. He was intelligent enough, and well-disposed, but so serious and old-fashioned that to spend the rest of her life with him was a thought so agonizing that it brought her to tears instantaneously.

"Cedrella?" Callidora asked through a mouthful of pins. "Are you all right?"

"Fine."

She was not fine in the least.

That night, Cedrella laid in bed and watched the skeleton of a wedding dress – which had been hung from the door of her wardrobe – flutter slightly in the wind from her window. The rustle of silk on silk might have been comforting (it had the same sound as tall moor grass in a breeze), had the very presence of the dress not been an indisputable signal that marriage, and the end of life that would come with it, was hurtling towards her faster than she could imagine.

Cedrella rose from the bed and paced her bedroom, back and forth, back and forth.

When Mr. Rosier placed the ring on her finger, she might be just as well-served to walk directly into her own grave as to kiss him. She could save herself agony if she did; otherwise, the rest of her married life would be nothing more than her waiting to die.

She stopped in front of the window and grasped the sill. The cool night air lifted her hair, and brought with it the scent of the city – a city that she would be cut off from the moment that she was to be held accountable to Mr. Rosier.

It was unfair. It was unfair and not _right_ that a girl as young as she should never have a chance to run freely.

It was unfair, and she would not stand for it.

Cedrella turned away from the window, and moved, trance-like, to her chest of drawers, and from the bottom drawer, she drew the white leather satchel that Mr. Rosier had given her as a gift soon after they were betrothed. For a moment, she felt guilt, for it had been a lovely gift, but her guilt did not forestall her.

Into the satchel she folded stockings, petticoats, and her woollen winter cloak. Things that would not be missed. She emptied half the contents of her coin pouch into it also, and placed the pouch itself on the edge of her dressing table, so that, when the time came, she could gather it up too, and quickly.

She had nowhere to go with her satchel full of clothes and galleons, not yet. But she had time to think on that. After all, her wedding was not for weeks yet, and she should not give her family a chance to track her down between when she left with her satchel, and when she was meant to stand in the church with Mr. Rosier and lay her life down just as permanently.

She did not want to have to leave. She knew that refusing marriage meant that she would no longer be able to tout the name Black with pride, no longer take her rightful place on the family tree, no longer be able to see her beloved sisters.

But if she had to give up those things in order to save herself from a life of suffering, then she would give them up gladly.

)O(

_Doomsday averted._


	2. Secret Message - Walburga

_I'm not at liberty to say how a secret message came for you today. It holds the secrets of my heart and my mind._

)O(

No one knew how Walburga loved her little brother.

Perhaps they thought she was too cold to care for anyone, and under any other circumstance, they would have been right. Walburga's natural state was scorn. She had no patience or love for her husband, less still for her sons. The few people she could have ever counted as friends, she suspected, tolerated her only out of a sense of duty, which was the only reason she tolerated _them_.

But Alphard was an exception. He had been born devoid of the spite that she had in abundance. She liked to think that she had stolen it away in some manner. Alphard was patient, loving, light-hearted, in ways that no one else in the family was. He and _only_ he did more than tolerate her.

It was his blasted compassion that ruined everything. As much as he loved her, he must have loved her wretched offspring more, else he would never have taken money from the family for Sirius's sake, and so ensured that he would never be with her again.

Her own son had stolen her brother away from her.

Others in the family must have been hurt by Alphard's betrayal – she could not imagine how they could not be; he had been beloved by them too – but on the rare occasion he was mentioned, she heard only vitriol in their voices, only loathing. She emulated it to the best of her abilities, because she of all people could not show herself to be the one who he had hurt.

At least she had the letters.

The first one had come to her on the wind while she was walking one day. It had fluttered directly in front of her, and she had snatched it out of the air, and when she saw Alphard's writing on the parchment, she had whirled and called out for him and begged him to show himself. He did not, but for a moment, she could almost taste his presence in the air.

The note was brief, assuring her only that he was safe and she should not worry about him, and that he missed her, but she read it over and over until she had every line and ink blot memorized. She kept it folded inside her bodice, against her heart, until the parchment was rubbed thin. For months, she believed it was the last remnant she would ever have of her brother, for every possession of his, every portrait with his face, every scroll or book bearing his name had been destroyed. A few paltry sentences were all she had of him left, then.

But then the second letter came, this one impaled upon the fence post of house number thirteen. It was longer, less abrupt, and in it, Alphard all but waxed poetical about how he thought about her and looked back with fondness on their days of close companionship. In a hastily scrawled post-script on the bottom, he told her that if she wished to no longer hear from him, all she need do was leave the letter where she had found it, and he would never contact her again.

The letter joined the other note inside her dress. She did not return it to where she had found it.

With every passing letter – always left in a different place – Walburga's fear of being discovered increased. If her family learned of her correspondences with her brother, then she would be disowned, just as he had been, and while he had – from what his letters said – borne the shame with ease, she did not think she had the fortitude for it. She kept the letters locked away, and only when she was alone in the house did she open the box and read and reread them until her eyes were blurred and her hands trembled.

She never wrote back to him, for she never knew how to find him. There was no drop point for the letters. She knew not even how he ensured they reached her – by spying, she assumed, and leaving them in places he knew she would frequent, though she was ever alert and never once did she catch sight of him.

Even if she had had the capacity to return a message, she didn't know what she would have said in it. How could she express in words feelings so deep that she barely understood them? How could she explain to Alphard without stealing his own phrases how deeply she missed him, how it hurt her cold heart to be apart from him, and how she longed, one day, to have the chance to see his face again, and tell him that she wanted nothing more than to be his sister again?

)O(

_I carry a secret message that I must give to you. It concerns suspicious blessings._


	3. Possum of the Grotto - Lysandra

_He lives under the banyan tree. When I'm in trouble, he helps me._

)O(

Lysandra had not been away from the manor in twenty-two years.

When she was married – _sold_ – to Arcturus, her parents had touted shyness as a virtue, and said that she would give him no trouble. _Easy to content_, they had said, and she had kept her eyes down and not contradicted them, no matter how discontented she already was.

"Wonderful," Arcturus had said, and on their wedding night, he had swept her away to the crumbling old manor house, so far out in the moors that not a soul knew where to find her. Later, she wondered how she had not been afraid, not knowing what sort of husband she had been given, but fear never occurred to her. She had been so relieved to be taken far away from the dreadful bustle of London.

The manor was her sanctuary, far removed from the harrowing world she had been in before, and she felt no loneliness there, though Arcturus only visited her rarely, perhaps once a week. She could stay in a room, alone with her needlework and her own thoughts, and be happier than she had ever been at the constant stream of parties that her parents had insisted she attend. She had made the manor perfect for herself: decorated it in the creams and pale rose colours that she loved, sheltered the gardens from harsh weather and kept them filled with beautiful plants that could never grown in Britain without her attentions, covered the beds with lace sheets and pillowcases stiff with embroidery. Arcturus understood her without asking, and never called upon her to entertain the rare guests that they had. When at last Lysandra bore children, she was relieved that they were daughters, and she raised them to be quiet ladies like herself. Whether she was successful, she was unsure, but they were quiet when they were with her, at the least.

It was a good life.

But after twenty-two years, even she began to lose her love of silence.

She had no daughters then, to give her the moments of human companionship that she found herself beginning to crave. Charis and Cedrella were at school, and Callidora in the city with her father, and she felt their absence more acutely than she had ever thought she could feel the presence of a human being. Never had she thought she would so wish to hear a voice that was not her own.

The rooms of the manor – which had always provided her with ample space before – began to close in. She tried to soften them with hangings of lace, but that only made the rooms feel smaller and more cramped, until she believed she could not take a breath without being smothered in her own needlework.

She tried to escape to the garden, but the foreign plants that she had once been so proud of seemed _all wrong_, intrusive and threatening. She paced to the very edges of the walls of the grounds, but could not bring herself to pass them. The world had changed since last she had been in it, she knew, and she feared what new madnesses she might encounter if she ventured out of her home now.

And so she sank down to the ground under the banyan trees that she had cultivated so carefully, the ones that had made a canopy beneath which she had sat happily on many a sunny day, both alone and with her little daughters, and sobbed into the grass until all she was aware of were tears and the whispers of wind in the leaves.

When Lysandra raised her head again, the sun had fallen, and starlight illuminated her gardens in eerie silver-white.

And there were two pinpricks of light shining out at her from the roots of the tree.

Lysandra scrambled backwards, heart beating in her throat. There were no vermin in her home; she had always made sure of it! How could any creature of intruded upon her little world?

The eyes in the shadows did not waver, and Lysandra pressed herself up against the trunk of another tree and held her breath, and watched them glow. For a terribly long time, they did not move, and then, at long last, a white, pointed nose emerged from the shadows, and a long, sleek creature followed it, never taking its eyes off Lysandra.

The creature was like a rat, but _enormous_, near to the size of a cat. Its fur shone white beneath the stars, and its eyes shone pink.

Lysandra let out a little whimper, and tried to draw herself further away from it, but it was undeterred. It crept towards her, its nose twitching and its tiny clawed feet curling white against the black earth, until it rested nearly at her feet.

She could feel the warmth of its body. She could hear the rustling of its fur every time she moved. Then it nudged gently against her leg, and she could not help but let out a little cry.

If the animal even noticed her cry, it was not bothered by it.

It curled against her skirt like a _pet_.

For what felt like hours, Lysandra stayed as stiff and still as she could manage, and the animal did not move.

When Arcturus came to the manor the next morning, he found his wife in the garden. Her dress was rumpled and stained with grass, and her eyes were wide and hollow.

"Lysandra?" he called out to her, and when she did not respond, he came closer. She was as still as a statue, but at last she turned her head and looked at him, and he had never seen such fear in her eyes.

"Lysandra?"

She raised a hand and pointed a shaking finger at something hidden from his view by her skirts. He approached her and leaned over to see what she was pointing at, and when he did, something white and furry shot from beneath her skirt and disappeared into the roots of a tree.

"By Merlin, what ever was that?"

"It- it was–" Lysandra's voice was weak and scratchy, and she spent a few long moments working her mouth and gesturing feebly before collapsing back and looking up at him helplessly.

He did not press the matter, but helped her to her feet and brought her inside to bed, and he did not notice the way she stared back over her shoulder as he pulled her away from the tree.

)O(

_I hear him creep through the leaves at night. I have kissed his lips and seen his red eyes shine._


End file.
